Research Finds the IRS Gives Better Customer Service Than Most Apps

&NewLine;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;A simple yes-or-no tech question was posed to 100 well known apps&period; Most never answered&period;&NewLine;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;&Tab;

As more products and companies go digital we've seen support quality diverge&colon; either customers can rely on good service in a timely manner&comma; or they are left out in the cold&period; In the world of apps&comma; it seems the latter situation is increasingly common&period;

Unfortunately&comma; we're seeing more of a reliance on FAQs&comma; canned email responses and other tactics that divert customers without providing a solid end-to-end experience&period; This emphasis on efficiency&comma; especially within software&comma; means companies are moving their attention away from central aspects of customer service and high customer satisfaction&colon; responsiveness&comma; helpfulness&comma;and personalization&period; Just because products are digital and "lean&comma;" does not mean these key pillars should be forgotten&period;

We've seen so much data around poor support in apps&comma; but wanted to see it for ourselves&period; So my team at Agent&period;ai decided to run a survey in which we sent a support inquiry to the top 100 Android apps on the Google Play store&comma; asking if their app would support the latest Samsung Galaxy phone&period; Simple&comma; right&quest; Well&period;&period;&period; not exactly&period;

Seventyone percent of Android apps never responded to a simple customer question&period;

Our survey found only 29 of top 100 Android apps were able to respond to even the most basic question&period; Inversely&comma; we did not even hear back from 71 percent of apps&period; It took an average of 25 hours for companies to respond to an easy yes or no question&period;

Only one app&comma; called KodiTV&comma; responded to the survey quickly &lpar;within three minutes&rpar;&period; They were also the only company to use chat for support&period; The next group of apps all took around three hours to answer our question&period; These included apps from Amazon&comma; Chase and Ubisoft&period; That's not bad&comma; so kudos to these companies&period; Even the IRS went above and beyond when we sent them a question about the IRS2Go app&comma; responding with a personalized message&period;

The bottom line is&comma; if the IRS can provide decent customer service in a timely manner&comma; then so should most apps&period;

iOS apps do better &period;&period;&period; but not by much&period;

We wanted to dive in a little deeper&comma; so we then sent a similar survey about the iPhone 8 to the top 25 free iOS apps across three verticals&colon; gaming&comma; travel&comma; and ecommerce&period;

In gaming&comma; we found 52 percent of apps responded to the question and the average response time was a few hours better at around 22 hours&period; One interesting statistic we found was that companies using in-app chat had a 65 percent higher response rate&comma; compared to companies using email to answer the question&period; In other words&comma; companies using in-app chat were over 4X as likely to answer the customer&period;

Although overall support was less than stellar&comma; one company in particular stood out as having a particularly ineffective system&period; EA required our team to create an EA account and then send an email&comma; requiring the user to use a channel outside of the app&period; EA replied to the customer inquiry via email three days later claiming to have resolved the ticket &period;&period;&period; without ever answering the question&period;

Ecommerce apps had the exact same response rate as gaming apps &lpar;52 percent&rpar;&comma; and a similar 60 percent increase in response rate between chat and email-based channels&period; Noticing a pattern&quest; So were we&period;

In travel&comma; things got ugly&period; Like with Android apps&comma; 68 percent of apps never responded&period; Once again&comma; though&comma; there was a striking difference between chat-based offerings and email&period; The companies using Facebook Messenger for customer communication responded about two-thirds of the time&comma; whereas companies relying on email responded 22 percent of the time&period;